Mine is special: the pervasive psychological advantage of self -owned objects

The concept of ownership is inherently social. We can claim ownership not only of accumulated material wealth, but also of ideas and places, as well as other people (i.e., my husband, our daughter). Potentially, the feeling of ownership extends to just about anything for which the terms mine, my, or our(s) (for shared ownership) can be applied. It can be founded in the laws of society (i.e., legal ownership) being recognized foremost by society, and hence the rights that co me with ownership are specified and protected by the legal system. Yet, ownership can manifest in the feelings toward an object that is owned by the individual (i.e., psychological ownership) without any legal claim to title (Pierce et al., 2003).

Rousseau (1762) suggested that “civil society” began when a person fenced off a plot of ground and took it into his or her head to claim “This is mine,” and other people accepted this assertion. Recognizing the importance of possession, Sartre (1943/1969) noted that “to have” is one of the three categories of human existence (along with “to do” and “to be”) and that “the totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. . . I am what I have . . . . What is mine is myself”

(pp. 591–592). Hence, scholars from various disciplines have tried to understand what ownership over an object really implies, and the conditions under which it manifests itself. Particularly informative were the works by James (1890) and Prelinger (1959) on objects perceived to be pa rt of the self.

James (1890) made seminal observations about the nature of the self, noting that it extends beyond the boundaries of one’s own body. The self can indeed “incorporate” many other possessions, including those that one is frequently in physical contact with (e.g., clothing, jewellery, sentimental objects, etc.) and those that one is tightly bound to in other ways (e.g., family members, reputation, creative accomplishments, etc.). As James (1890, pp. 291–2) put it, ‘‘a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and yacht and bank-account. All these things give him the same emotions’.’

The most widely accepted view is that psychological ownership reflects a relationship between an individual and an object (material or immaterial) in which the object is experienced as having a close connection with the self (Furby, 1978a, 1978b; Litwinski, 1942) and becomes part of the “extended self” (Belk, 1988; Dittmar, 1992). As Isaacs (1933) noted, “what is mine becomes (in my feelings) a part of ME” (p. 225). Moreover, the state of psychological ownership (i.e., “mine-ness” or “our-“mine-ness”) is composed of a cognitive and affective core that results in different behaviors. It is a condition of which one is aware through and reflects an individual’s awareness, thoughts, and beliefs regarding the target of ownership. This cognitive state, however, is coupled

with an emotional or affective sensation: feelings of ownership are said to be pleasure producing per se (Beggan, 1992; Furby, 1978a; Nuttin, 1987; Porteous, 1976) and are accompanied by a sense of efficacy and competence (White, 1959). As a result, feelings of ownership toward various objects have important and potentially strong psychological and behavioural effects.

Because of their association with the self, owned objects are believed to enjoy a special psychological status (as being viewed as extensions of self, Beggan, 1992; Sartre, 1943; James, 1890). For example, people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them, phenomenon known as the “endowment effect”. In one of the first demonstrations of this effect in literature, Knetsch (1989) presented three groups of undergraduates with coffee mugs and chocolate bars. The participants in Group 1 could choose any item before completing a questionnaire, and effect seems to reveal a strong propensity not just to over-value one’s own possessions, but to treat them as elements of one’s extended self.

This is further illustrated by the classical “mere ownership” effect, a tendency for objects arbitrarily assigned to self (i.e., owned but not chosen by self) to be imbued with more positive characteristics (Beggan, 1992; Belk, 1988, 1991). Beggan examined how individuals rated their preference for objects of varying ownership statuses. Participants were presented with different objects and asked to rate how much they liked the object, as well as the value of receiving the object as a gift. In the ownership condition, prior to rating the items, each subject read that she would receive the object as a gift for her participation. The participants rated self-owned objects more favourably than the other participants who did not own the object. The mere ownership effect was obtained even when there was no time delay between when participants were informed they owned the target object and when they were asked to rate its attractiveness. Because the participants still showed a preference for self-owned compared to other-owned objects, this preference could not be attributed to familiarity with self-owned objects (Beggan, 1992). This is a striking example of an influence of ownership: people prefer and give significantly more positive evaluations to trivial items they own compared to those they do not. Remarkably, this effect does not appear to be due to the amount of time spent, attention paid, increased contact, familiarly with owned objects (Beggan,

1992). Likewise, numerous subsequent studies have shown that, compared to unowned objects, owned objects are attended, remembered, and valued more strongly, even when the experience of possession is only imaginary or very brief (e.g., Belk, 1988, 1991; Cunningham et al., 2008; Gray et al., 2004; Shi et al., 2011; Turk, van al., 2011a, 2011b; van den Bos et la., 2010; see Morewedge and Giblin 2015 and Kemmerer 2014 for recent reviews).

It is interesting to note that the assignment of items as mine does not have to be self-generated. Cunningham et al. (2008) asked participants to sort images of objects based on an arbitrary assignment to an ownership category (“mine” or “other”). Subsequent recognition was higher for self-owned objects in comparison with other-owned objects, regardless of whether the participant or a confederate had sorted the items. What Cunningham et al.ʼs (2008) findings reveal is that self-item associations forged through psychological ownership yield a similar mnemonic advantage to that generated through the explicit, evaluative encoding of trait adjectives describing the self (Turk et al., 2008; Symons and Johnson, 1997). The link between possessions and the self may help to explain why we provide higher valuations (the endowment effect) and positive attributes (mere ownership effect) to owned items. This skewing of value and valence may reflect the operation of positivity biases that distort the evaluation of material possessions that comprise an important element of self (Beggan, 1992; Belk, 1988, 1991; Kahneman et al., 1991; Knetsch and Sinden, 1984). That is, our tendency to have a positive bias towards ourselves (e.g. Koole, et al., 2001) also extends to our property (Gawronski et al., 2007). Hence, the self-relevance of our property may give rise to stronger memory representations of our possessions relative to unowned objects (Cunningham et al., 2008; van den Bos et al., 2010).

In line with the view that the sense of possessing certain inanimate objects is related to self-referential processing, further insight into the basis of the relationship between the self and the extended self comes from TMS and fMRI and investigations. Salerno and colleagues (2012) found similar increase in similar corticospinal motor excitability induced via TMS while participants watching pictures of one’s own hand and phone. Using Cunningham et al.’s paradigm (2008), Turk et al. (2011b) asked participants to categorize everyday items as either self-owned or other-owned in the scanner. They showed that the recognition of self-owned items uniquely engaged the medial prefrontal cortex as well as the insula and supramarginal gyrus. This suggests that cortical midline brain areas previously associated with self-referential encoding (for instance the medial prefrontal cortex, see Northoff et al., 2006) and regions that have been shown to support hedonic aspects (for instance the insula) might play an important role in forming associations between self and owned objects. Similarly, the medial prefrontal cortex was found to be involved in the endowment effect and even when ownership is processed implicitly (Kim et al., 2010; Kim and Johnson; 2012; 2014;

Kim et al., 2015; Krigolso et al., 2013). Taken together, these data ‘‘provide neural evidence for the idea that personally relevant external stimuli may be incorporated into one’s sense of self’’ (Kim and Johnson, 2014, p. 1).